Friday, June 10, 2016

I presented this derashah last Shabbos, and it seems to have been fairly well-received. Since I haven't had time to post, I'll offer it here for (hopefully) your reading pleasure.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall / That
sends the frozen ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun…

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; / And on a day we meet to walk the
line

And set the wall between us once again…

There where it is, we do not need the wall: / He is all pine and I am apple
orchard.

My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I
tell him.

He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

In 1914, Robert Frost
published this classic poem, “Mending Wall”, about two neighbours whose
properties are divided by a stone wall. The first neighbour describes the wall
as an unecessary barrier; the other neighbour preaches an unquestioning
devotion to received wisdom, that “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Torah: Walls create
unhelpful division

At first glance, the
Torah seems to take the side of the first neighbour, and to argue even more
strongly, that walls are worse than superfluous; they create destructive
divisions, and they should be eliminated:

With the mitzvah of shemitah, the Torah warns that walls separate
haves from have-nots, preventing chesed. Yes, our property needs protection,
but every seven years we must acknowledge the downside, drop our guard,
and allow the world into our fields and vineyards. The Torah states, “You
shall release your field and abandon it,[1]”
and the Mechilta[2]
comments מגיד שפורץ בה פרצות, that the Torah wishes us to actually smash holes in our
fences,[3] and
remove that barrier.

Second, with the mitzvah of batei arei chomah, the Torah warns that
walls separate urban life from agriculture. The Torah bans family estates
in walled-in cities. If a family sells an open field, they receive the
field back in the Yovel year. But if a family sells a building in a walled
city, that building never comes back.[4]
Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch explains that farming is the natural focus of human
creativity, and the Torah wishes us to remain close to the land. Yes, we
need to shield civilization from the wild, but because of this downside to
urbanization, we must eliminate the wall.[5]

Third: The Torah’s tochachah threats of Divine punishment warn that
there is even danger in the walls that separate us from our enemies, because
they lead to faith in our manmade defenses. Walls of defense may be
entirely necessary. But the Torah[6]
warns that if these fortresses breed misplaced trust in our own strength,
then a day will come when Gd will demolish our walls.

Something there is
that doesn’t love a wall, in the Torah. There are negative, unhelpful walls –
walls that insulate the wealthy from the needy, walls that enable urban
stagnation, walls that lead to arrogance.

But there are good
walls, too

On the other hand: The
second neighbour, with his devotion to maintaining the wall, can also claim
endorsement from the Torah!

Halachah identifies the manmade walls of Yerushalayim as sacred, imbuing
the city with sanctity, just as the concentric walls of the Beis haMikdash
enable a heirarchy of holiness within their precincts!

Further, we use walls for beautiful mitzvos – the succah in which
we dwell with Hashem, the chuppah in which we initiate a Jewish home!

How, then, are we to
understand the Jewish view of a wall? Are they bad, or good? Is there a single
answer? What would Rabbi Robert Frost say?

Propinquity

In the 1940s, a team
of MIT psychologists conducted the “Westgate Studies”, trying to figure out which
interactions lead to friendships. They developed what is now known as the
propinquity effect. To state it simply: Even though people say that
“familiarity breeds contempt,” the truth of human nature is that the more you
encounter someone, the more likely you are to like them, and to create a
friendship with them.[7]

Those studies have
influenced the way companies design their workspaces. For example: the
successful animation company Pixar initially housed its computer scientists in
one building, its animators in another building, and its executives and editors
in a third building. Steve Jobs, as CEO, redesigned the offices to bring all of
the groups together, into one space. Why? Because inhabiting a shared,
collaborative space encourages relationships.[8]
And this can be enhanced by a surrounding wall that accentuates the
collaboration.

Two Kinds of Walls

So perhaps there are
two kinds of walls: Exclusive and Inclusive.

The Exclusive wall is the wall around the field, meant to exclude
and obstruct: the wall that locks out the needy; the wall that separates
the city from nature; the wall that provides overconfident defense. This
is the wall the Torah would demolish.

But there is also the Inclusive wall, that creates collaborative
closeness, even intimacy, by enhancing propinquity for those within.

We, as Jews, identify ourselves
as part of a nation, a community, a team. To promote that shared identity and
cohesion, we build walls encircling and identifying our team. This wall, designed
to include, to embrace, to envelop in private community – this wall is not
merely appropriate, but glorious![9]

The walls of the Chuppah isolate a couple exclusively for each
other![11]

And the walls of Yerushalayim demarcate מחנה ישראל,
a camp which the Rambam[12]
said is invested with eternal holiness by those very walls.

The Walls of
Yerushalayim

The walls of
Yerushalayim are positive walls, meant not to exclude Beit Lechem and Chevron
and other surrounding cities, but rather to encircle the people within, Jews of
all ages and all ethnicities and all types of observance, to create a unified
community. Those walls of Yerushalayim are large enough to embrace us all - and
as the fifth perek of Pirkei Avos promises, no Jew will ever say, “I cannot
find my place in Yerushalayim.”[13]

Our sages acted to encourage
this sense of community in Yerushalayim.

Three times each year, Jews from far and wide would gather there for
Yom Tov, fulfilling the mitzvah of aliyah laregel. Some of these were very
observant Jews, and others were less so. This meeting of populations could
have been a disaster – there could have been an insistence on separate shopping
spaces for the ritually pure, separate eating areas for those who tithe
more carefully, and so on.

But the Chachamim understood that the only wall Yerushalayim will
tolerate is the wall surrounding it, the wall which identifies all of us
as part of the same team! As the gemara records, they decreed that when we
gather in Yerushalayim for Yom Tov, every Jew should be viewed as a חבר,
credible to declare his own purity, credible to have tithed his produce.
We could travel together, eat together, meet together, within those walls
of Yerushalayim.[14]

This is what we want.
There are legitimate differences between Jews, but what we want is not a nation
divided by the questions of Who is a Jew, of Who goes to the army and who
learns in kollel, of Who davens at the Kotel and in what way, but a nation that
sees itself as one nation, indivisible, surrounded by walls which confirm our
shared heritage and our shared destiny.

Beyond Yerushalayim

And this imperative
for propinquity extends beyond Yerushalayim, mandating us to build physical and
metaphorical inclusive walls surrounding us, marking us as one nation wherever
we are, despite our legitimate differences.

No matter where they daven, and even if they don’t daven anywhere.

No matter what standard of kashrus they keep, and even if they
don’t keep any.

No matter which approach they have to Israel, whether they believe
it’s ראשית צמיחת גאולתנו or whether they believe it’s a secular catastrophe.

Inviting these people into our homes for a meal – not only because
it’s kiruv, but because we are ערבין
זה בזה.

Offering to daven on behalf of their relatives and friends who are
ill – not only because davening for others a mitzvah, but because we care
about each other.

Even just smiling and welcoming people who aren’t within the circle
of friends and cousins with whom we grew up, and whom we’ve known for
decades – not because it’s chesed, but because it’s the right way to build
a wall.

These, like the walls
of Yerushalayim, are the glorious, encircling walls beloved to the Torah.

Reagan

In 1987, with Soviet
Communism teetering, US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin, and he delivered
a speech which became an instant classic. Standing before the wall dividing
East and West Berlin, he proclaimed, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

That historic line
almost didn’t happen. The speechwriter, Peter Robinson, wanted it in, but nervous
diplomats insisted that Germans had grown used to the wall. So Robinson went to
dinner with some local residents, and he asked them if they had “gotten used
to” the Wall – to which the residents responded harshly that they certainly had
not. The rest is oratorical history.[15]
And two years later, the wall did finally come down.

With the laws of
shemitah and walled cities, with the warning of the Tochachah, the Torah
teaches us to “tear down this wall” which divides. But with the succah and the
chuppah and the holiness of Yerushalayim, the Torah teaches us to “build up
this wall” of propinquity which encircles and envelops, creating shared
identity and community. Such is the beauty of the walls of Yerushalayim.

May we see Hashem
rebuild these walls with fire; may we see Hashem rebuild these walls now; and
may we view them not by live stream on our phones in Toronto, but as part of
that sacred community, from the inside.

2 comments:

Something there is in Pirkei Avot, however, that does love a fence. Is there a difference between a wall and a fence? Is the "fence around the Torah" in a different category, possibly because it assigns us all to the category of those who must be kept from getting too close, as opposed to a wall which might be seen more as creating division between people, "us" who are okay and "them" who are not?

Bratschegirl - Interesting, but to me that's a different entity altogether. In Hebrew we would call this usage of "fence" a שם מושאל - a word which is borrowed for multiple purposes. The fences I am describing either separate two entities (negative), or define a group (positive). I don't think the halakhic fence does either.